A Dash of Eros, a Pinch of Sympathy

By MOLLY O'NEILL

Published: July 8, 1998

THE morning sun that flooded Isabel Allende's kitchen was as innocent and unblemished as a perfect egg yolk. It slid across the counter of hand-painted tiles and made her dangling silver earrings sparkle.

But Ms. Allende, the Chilean novelist, was, for the moment, immune to the poetry and the pleasure of the warm sun. She was in the middle of an atavistic ritual that might have made a scene in one of her seven books.

She was cooking Sunday lunch for her husband, her son and his fiancee, and any of her large extended family who might clamber up the steps to her modern house perched on a hill above San Francisco Bay.

Tending family tradition is second nature to Ms. Allende. So is breaking rules. She was cooking up aphrodisiacs, family style.

And she saw nothing odd in it.

''Love and sympathy keep us close,'' she said. And the spirits who inhabit the magical reality of her fiction would approve.

''Only governments and churches are afraid of human pleasure,'' said Ms. Allende, 56, whose first book, ''The House of the Spirits,'' catapulted her in 1985 from the small world of feminist journalism in Chile to international best-seller lists.

''Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses,'' published this spring (Harper Flamingo, $26), added food -- specifically, its erotic possibilities -- to the milieu of love and war Ms. Allende had already claimed.

To her, Eros is a magical life force, a subtle sensibility, not some crass, hyperactive satyr. ''Erotic is using a feather,'' she said. ''Pornography is when you use the whole bird.''

By weaving together folklore, literature and her own experience, Ms. Allende opens the door of Aphrodite's pantry. There, an almond is not a nut, but a myth-drenched symbol of femininity. And black pepper is not merely a seasoning, but an aliment that can cheer widows and aid the impotent.

''This is a practical book,'' she writes in ''Aphrodite.'' ''We know how difficult it is to find paws of koala, eye of salamander and urine of a virgin -- three species on the endangered list.''

Her old-fashioned recipes are simple, mostly because she is a practical person. Her dishes, like crepes suzette and coq au vin, recall the coffee-tea-or-me 1960's in America, when frumpy French cooking defined elegance and the sensual aspects of eating were not polite conversation.

Since then, food has become sexier than sex in the United States, so Ms. Allende's thesis is less than startling. But the stimulating potential of dinner was new to the author, an outspoken feminist and unreconstructed seductress.

For Ms. Allende, the writing of this book was part of a rediscovery of the senses after a personal tragedy. Seven years ago, her daughter, Paula, developed a rare and fatal illness, and since then Ms. Allende hasn't written any fiction. After Paula's death in 1992, ''the world was flat, gray, completely lifeless,'' she said as she whisked several dozen eggs to a fine foam.

Only when she began to dream about food -- of diving into an ocean of rice pudding, for example, or of slathering a handsome man with guacamole and tucking him in a corn tortilla -- did Ms. Allende realize it was possible to emerge from the long tunnel of mourning.

And with maturity, food can be, if not a fountain of youth, at least a wellspring of desire. ''When you are young, you don't need anything but passion,'' she said. ''As I get older I find that I need to stir the juices a little. You know, life becomes more complicated, days can slip by without an embrace.''

She added, ''Dinner starts to figure a little more prominently in the mating dance, if you know what I mean.''

As she stood there at the stove, she looked like a cross between Bianca Jagger and a Diego Rivera mother bountiful. Her diaphanous black silk skirt swished against her ankle-high boots. Her snug burgundy sweater traced the rise of her ribs as she inhaled the scent from a simmering pot of husky mushroom soup.

''Reconciliation soup,'' she said. ''I always fix it after some terrible fight. It's a flag of truce that allows me to make peace without humiliating myself too much. My opponent only has to smell the soup to understand the message.'' The smell was of wild mushrooms infused with garlic.

She had prepared a salad of pears with Roquefort sauce. This cheese, she said, is too ripe and pungent not to be an aphrodisiac. She began arranging the pears on the salad plates.

''In the end, the only thing that really works is love, affection and presentation,'' she said. A descendant of one of Chile's most venerable families, Ms. Allende grew up in the sprawling family compound in Santiago, where disdain of earthly pleasures was a virtue. But when she was 9, her life took a turn away from the restraints of upper-class Catholicism. Her mother, who had divorced her first husband, remarried, and her second husband was both a diplomat and a bon-viveur. The family table was transformed into an opulent buffet.

Later, in her work as a television commentator and left-leaning feminist writer, Chile's political unrest swirled around her (her uncle was Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist President, who was toppled by the military in 1973), the family fortunes shifted, and food became hard to find.

Still, she remained in Chile until she heard the sound of the secret police's cars in the night before fleeing to Venezuela.

''We moved into the same building as my mother, who had a perpetual contest with Berta, her cook,'' Ms. Allende said. ''Slowly, I started to think of cooking in a new way.''

Her first marriage ended, and in 1990 she moved to the United States and married Willie Gordon, a California lawyer. At first, he did all the cooking. Until 1990, Ms. Allende published novels with breakneck frequency -- and she never made a meal.

''I started to realize that Willie always served the same menu, always something grilled,'' she said. ''So I started fancy soups or appetizers or dessert.''

She continued: ''I spend my youth worrying about things like feminism and guerrillas. Then I get into my 50's and I start to realize that the weaknesses of the flesh that tempt me most are not, alas, alas, the ones I've practiced the most.''

By now, it was almost 2 P.M., time for Ms. Allende to shoo her swarming family out of the kitchen so she could tend to the omelets.

At first, the task of congealing the outer surface of the beaten eggs into a fragile net seemed more daunting than writing a novel. But stirring, tipping and calibrating the flame, she turned out one half-moon of tenderness after another.

Contemplating the row of six quivering omelets, Ms. Allende flushed. As steam beaded on them like sweat and caviar oozed from their centers, Ms. Allende called her family to lunch.

RECONCILIATION SOUP

Adapted from ''Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses,'' by Isabel Allende

Time: 1 hour 10 minutes

1/2 cup portobello mushrooms, chopped (if dried, 1/4 cup)

1/2 cup porcini mushrooms, chopped (if dried, 1/4 cup)

1/2 cup red wine if using dried mushrooms, for soaking

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 clove garlic

1 cup cremini mushrooms

2 cups stock (beef, chicken or vegetable)

1/4 cup port

1 tablespoon truffle-flavored olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons sour cream.

1. If using dried mushrooms, soak them in the red wine until they become plump.

2. Heat olive oil in a large pot. Saute the garlic clove and all the mushrooms; add the red wine used to soak the dried mushrooms. Stir vigorously for about 5 minutes.

3. Add the stock, port and truffled olive oil. Season with salt and pepper, and cook, covered, over low heat until the mushrooms are soft, about 1 hour.

4. Transfer the soup to a blender, working in batches to prevent the hot soup from splattering. The soup should be slightly thick. Serve in warmed bowls, garnished with a dollop of sour cream.

Yield: 2 servings.

Photo: MAKING POTIONS -- In her kitchen and her writing, Isabel Allende explores food as magic.